Business service management (BSM) is generally a methodology for monitoring and measuring information technology (IT) services from a business perspective. Often, BSM includes a set of management software tools, processes and methods to manage the IT of a business or businesses. BSM tools are generally designed to help IT organizations view and manage technology environments, in order to better support and maintain the main services they provide to the business.
Generally, businesses execute or run a number of applications or systems (e.g., computers, etc.). Often these applications may collect or have access to different types of data. For example, an email system may include an email server application which is executed by one or more physical computers or servers. In such an example, a Help-Desk application may collect or access data referring to various user's experiences and troubles with an email system. Conversely, the email server application itself my collect or access data regarding how the email system processes emails (e.g., user not found errors, failure to deliver errors, number of emails sent, etc.). A third business application may monitor the system resources (e.g., processor load, memory utilization, network bandwidth, etc.) used by the physical computer or computes executing the email server application.
Traditionally, these pieces of information may be dispersed across various IT or business applications. As such, a traditional BSM set of management tools may not be able to provide a user or BSM software with a full view of the status or health of the email system. Generally, an application, even a BSM application, may only access data that is accessible by that application. Therefore, the Help-Desk application, in a traditional environment, would not be able to access the data collected by the email server application (e.g., user not found errors, etc.) or the system resource monitoring application (e.g., network load, etc.). As a result, a user of the Help-Desk application would have a limited view or understanding of the state or status of the email system. Such issues may occur for other IT applications.